


This Blood

by handful_ofdust



Category: Blade: Trinity
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 21:31:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9091528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handful_ofdust/pseuds/handful_ofdust
Summary: Just because you're snide, it doesn't mean you're empty.





	

Danica Talos remembers everything. Every look, every touch, every word--each shiny little freeze-frame instamatic moment, albeit stretching back (far) further than the terminology, or possibly the concept. This isn't a vampire thing, because her brother Asher does it too; can, anyway. But doesn't, usually, or at least makes like he doesn't. Asher's mantra, selective amnesia in action: Find it, fuck it, then fuck it away again. So maybe he can pick and choose, or maybe he just pretends he can, because he's a bitch that way...

Yeah, that way. And every other way, too.

Right now she's studying the cut of Asher's newest suit-- _so_ fucking 1975--and remembering that other night (Wednesday July 5, 1992, 3:35 A.M.) in that boozecan (Bo Diddley's) on Adelaide near Queen West (Adelaide and John, across from the National Film Board--Queen West being Goth Central even then, so near but not on, because that'd just've been lame)...

Sitting there watching the skinny young guy she hadn't yet known was Hannibal King chug shot after flaming shot, like he was breaking a damn record: King, with his bullshit hair, his even more bullshit clothes. King drunk as fuck and twice as mean, his wit worn all inside-out and backwards like a razorblade necklace, like he'd just got fired off some sitcom from Hell; looking at him sideways, trying not to be so _obvious._ And thinking:

_Oh nice, not. Looky here, boys 'n' girls: Homo Assaholicus, the devil in the flesh. You can dress a shit up, but you sure can't take him anywhere--_

(except down)

And later:

"Tell me you're not _trying_ to look like David Hasselhoff."

"'Kay, I'm not. Hey, nice 'do--you iron it, or what?"

"...yes..."

While, even later:

"Whoooaaa, Nellie, um, could you not, uh, oh Christ are those your _teeth,_ woman? Holy SHIT, you--can't move, can't _move,_ you're hypnotizing me, aren't you. I mean... _aren't_ you?"

But: "Shut your pie-hole," she'd just snapped, and slapped him down one-handed. And things'd gone pretty much the way they always did, from then on.

She sees King these days, all Jim Fixx, and thinks: _Wow, thirty extra pounds of buff at least, hot damn._ Which is wicked cool in one sense, and totally bogus in another, mostly because no matter how ripped he gets, taking the Cure has busted him right back on down to beef on the hoof...super-cattle-fragilistic party meat and nothing but, too slow to really spar with anybody who doesn't have both fangs tied behind their backs--

( _image,_ EW)

\--not even that pack of losers _he_ made, here and there. Once or twice upon a time.

When they were both vampires, King could pin her-- _did,_ when she wanted him to. Or even when she didn't. They could go at it all night, every night, and la Magra help any dupe who got between. Just a pipecleaner frat boy in WAY bad clothes (his fashion sense never did improve, aside from figuring out the Knight Rider look wasn't coming back), but a Lord of fuckin' Darkness in the sack: Inventive, sick, cruel the way only made vampires can be, because they have something to prove; Deacon Frost cruel, almost. Like legendarily so.

That was then, though. Now he's just another two-leg treat for her to straddle and suck off 'till her pussy turns warm. Fucking King!

Asher sees her pouting, pops her one on the ear and draws a hiss: Queen of Nightside Vancouver, asshole. _Thinking,_ here.

"Stop obsessing," he says, blithely. "King again, right? Shit, Dan, at least be original--the slut wasn't all _that,_ even before he flipped."

" _You_ liked him." Then, as Asher snorts: "Well, you DID."

"Parts of him, sure. Which, li'l sis, is frankly right where you should've left it; never do some guy you meet in a bar. So declasse."

"But _do_ do some moron you meet at the WWF? God, fuck YOU. Bitch."

A wide, fanged smile. " _Bitsy_ bitch."

You can't make Asher embarrassed, though--it's been proven. Everything he does is either right or an experiment gone interesting; no harm, no fault, no foul.

...must be nice.

Brood, brood, brood: Looks pretty stupid from the outside, Danica's well aware, but the situation does kind of warrant it. Not the least since Talos Enterprises accidentally got itself shoehorned between two superfreaks; Blade on the one side, dour like he gets paid not to smile, still carrying a chip from just missing being pumped out the good ol' fashioned way--in a rush of red and a snap of wet-nurse mayhem, like any other pureblood. And on the other--

Dracula, Drake, whatever he's calling himself now. The Great Sumerian Hope.

Drake thinks Danica's a useless baby, like all the rest of her clique--and fucked as it is, she can sort of see his point, considering. But whatever her affectations, she's exactly as worthy of respect and recognition as any other of his multi-great-grandchildren: Born with teeth, a vampire to the core. Like King so often reminds her, whenever he chooses to take a header through whatever window she happens to be lurking behind, she's never known what it is to bleed.

Never wanted to, either.

This blood burning inside of her, a thousand years of Mutant Pride made flesh. This communion she gives out anytime she wants, to anyone who takes her fancy, for the exact same reason that dogs lick their balls and _why the hell not,_ anyway, asshole?

Because she CAN.

The last time Danica saw that ungrateful peon King in any meaningful way--ie, without Miss Whistler Thing and her crossbow somewhere in the same vicinity--he'd been wearing a black muscle shirt over fatigue pants, with that stupid silver longhorn bull belt-buckle she'd once given him slung L-O-W over his sharp new abs. She had a gun on him; he had two on her. Like old times, except without the sex. Or the drugs, or the rock 'n' roll.

Or the blood.

And: "So how'd it go down, exactly?" She'd asked him, like the answer mattered about as much as what sort of polish went with her next pedicure. "You volunteered to go test-case, 'cause you just felt so _bad_ about your bad, bad self? Or was it more like they threw you in a cage, pumped in the vamp-no-more serum, and you woke up with five years' worth of moral hangover?"

"That'd be the latter."

"Thought so." She'd given him the slow, cool once-over, then, and had to smile at the sound of him cocking his second gun, almost automatically. "You do look cute, though."

"Thanks. Feels good to be able to blush."

Another little smile, voice lowering to murmur-mode: "Looks good, too."

"Uh huh, yeah; step back, missy."

The Cure was Blade's fault too, indirectly. Coined by his ex, Dr Karen Jensen, it spun on the idea that vampirism was nothing but a bodily function gone wrong--"Sort of like you took a big, steaming crap all over me," King'd explained, brightly. A beat. "Which is certainly the way I remember it feeling, that first time."

"Oh yeah, poor you--not like you ended up with superpowers, or anything. Whiny fucking whore."

"Kiss my Jazzercized butt, you slut from Hell."

"Loser."

"Ballbreaker."

"Metrosexual."

"Vagina dentata."

" _Nerd._ "

And that'd been that, for then. Maybe for ever. Or 'till the next time, if nothing else.

Danica doesn't know why it hurts her; nothing should. Nothing usually does. But King, King...he wasn't special, because nobody was. But he sure was--

(fun)

\-- _different._ Not Asher, diffidently "caring" what she cared about, at least while it made him laugh. Not _her,_ always constantly playing and re-playing tape-loops of her own self-doubt like a lazy deejay. Like the male her, in so many more ways than the obvious: Reflexively snide, weirdly vulnerable. Always knowing just where to push.

Not that he deserves a medal for THAT, though. Especially considering how obviously she'd made it, from night fucking one.

It's the way things are, the way they've always been. It's her, inside-out, in a far deeper way than any outer significant can ever reach. Down below the lime-green kimono or the Bettie Page bondage shoes, down below whatever torture she's putting her hair through this week, or the fact that even when she's all fanged up she looks less like the Queen of the Damned than a dentistry student's wet dream: Overbite city, a close-packed grin framed by unflattering Clinique brown. She can jump up a wall from a dead stand, party all night and into the day (as long as the shades are closed); she and Asher--and King, much as she's sure he tells himself different--once cleaned out a whole apartment building just for fun, working it at ultrasonic speed, like lampreys turned piranhas. But none of it matters when she's heading the table; even her strut is just a controlled potential pratfall, over and over and over again.

Danica tries hard to impress, always has, but somehow, it just doesn't stick. So all she can do is try her best to accept the consequences of her own innate (social) inadequacies, and mother-fuckin' DEAL.

Besides which--she stepped up, didn't she? When the kingmaker slot came free. When the vampire nation shrank to a feeble shadow of its former might and then re-coagulated in Vancouver, of all damn places--fleeing the Daywalker and the fallout from Damaskinos' insane genetic meddlings, split down the middle between made and un-, sniffing its own demise on the wind. When everybody and their spawn started clamoring to take up Frost's first Apocalypse again, trigger an ELE and bring nuclear winter down like eternal night, reduce the human herd to a network of warehoused blood-bags and start on over.

Yeah. Like _that_ was ever a workable long-range idea, once King and his brood got word of it. Still, it didn't cost much to set up one test facility, and it does keep the rest of the Council off her back; gave her the time she needed for other stuff, like finding Drake.

_And if that doesn't work, Dan? What'cha gonna do then, aside from wishing you had a Plan C to go with your A and B?_

...probably.

Asher's the one who keeps the books, but Danica's the one who calls the shots. Who tries to spin some sort of agenda from her kin's chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off mob madness. And while the moves she makes may not always pan out--

( _Don't,_ more often than not. In actual point of fact.)

\--at least she _has_ a fucking plan, most of the time. A clue. A motivation which reaches towards _something_ beyond the same old same old: Strike a pose, suck a vein, snap a neck, repeat...

But: _Drake's probably right about one thing,_ she thinks, moodily. _The vampire nation must've fallen pretty fucking far, if Studio 54 trash like you and Asher somehow ended up in charge._

Ah, well.

Chances are she'll either live forever, a porcelain doll filled (and refilled) by strangers' blood, or her unlife will end with a molten shower of sparks--a fairytale climax much like the Grimm Brothers' evil queen's, danced to death in her red-hot iron shoes. Which is fine: As anybody can see, Danica _likes_ shoes. Particularly the kind you have to be undead to wear.

Danica remembers everything: Life in the fast lane, everything, all the time. Which can rock or suck, depending--

\--depending on what, exactly, it is that you have to remember.


End file.
